


I am the fire and I am the forest, and I am the witness watching it

by maplewoodmoth



Category: The Wizard of Oz & Related Fandoms, Wicked - All Media Types, Wicked - Schwartz/Holzman
Genre: 7 years ago, ? - Freeform, Gen, I don't even GO here this is a GIFT ok?, This story is about GHOSTS, about this story idea, at the moment this is mostly a disjointed collection of thoughts I have, especially ones that don’t leave you alone, please comment your thoughts as I have no idea what I'm doing, that I promised a friend I would write about
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-29
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2019-10-19 01:01:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 2,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17591756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplewoodmoth/pseuds/maplewoodmoth
Summary: When Nessarose is 6, her older sister dies. That doesn’t really stop her in the grand scheme of things, but it does complicate growing up some. The fact that her sister never really left after she died, does too.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Burning Hill by Mitski.  
> This is also a gift and a placation for my best friend and sister in arms fae’sflower who's over at fan fiction.net. Go give her stories a read, she puts her heart and soul into them.

Looking back, Ness feels like she should have known El’s funeral for what it was. 

With all the somber moods, condolences and black dresses. The only thing though, was that all of Ness’s childhood was a funeral: mourning for a woman that she would never meet (mourning for a woman that she had killed by being born). Growing up with the empty space left by a woman she has never met: with the black clothes, and the quiet voices and a mourning, angry father averse to touches and kind words, as if their very presence is a plague to him. A horrible reminder to what he’s lost. (Father warms up to Ness, after El’s death. It takes her a while to realize that it was El’s protective (and condemning) presence keeping him away. It keeps him away after, though, when he realizes that his remaining daughter is far more at knowing and comfortable than he is, with his noisy dead following him around.)

But the black clothes bring no suspicion. Ness notices that El wears black a lot. It’s not weird, it’s a staple of her wardrobe. Black is sensible: black is the color of mourning, after all (and their whole house is a graveyard). And it’s not strange to Ness that El is always wearing black. It’s not suspicious to El that everyone else there is wearing black too.  
(But Ness likes it best when El wear colors, she thinks they make her look like a flower queen or nymph or fairy princess from one of her stories).

So when all of the family comes to visit wearing black, it’s not weird to Ness.  
When all of them speak quietly to her, or give her sad, pitying glances, she thinks nothing of it. Because this is something that she’s always been used to, at her 6 years of age.  


So Ness just smiles and politely shakes her relatives hands like she knows she should, and thanks them politely, masking her confusion. And when she gets tired of all of that, when no one is watching, she wheels herself off to bother El, who’s sitting, ignored, in a forgotten corner reading her book with bruised eyes. 

A book that she stops reading long enough to smile warmly at her little sister as she rolls up awkwardly angled in the corner. Neither of them say anything, but in the quiet peace, away from all the prying eyes and overwhelming sadness, Ness feels like she can finally breathe away from the oppressive atmosphere. Neither Ness nor El say anything, but then again, nothing needs to be said.


	2. CHAPTER 2

People would always rather compare Ness to her mother. Her beautiful, kind, tragic, cold, and very, very much dead mother, whom she has never known. 

Ness would much rather be compared to her big sister. Everyone calls El distant and cold and aloof and strange and different. But those people have never heard El break out into funny voices during story time, to get the characters /just/ right. Those people have never seen how happy she gets, when she has a new book, how she gets so excited she forgets what to do with her hands and lets them flutter quietly around the book’s cover, as if patting down it’s perfect cover. How her hands twist into her dress, fingers fisted into the folds of the fabric, when the old lady who sells vegetables down the road turns her nose up when they pass her stand, making a point not to greet El as she warmly calls out to their father and Ness. How she can barely hold a smile when she catches Ness making a face at the old bird’s back in retaliation. Ness loves her sister. Her lovely, kind, careful sister. Who would go chasing down the moon rabbit if she thought it would make Ness smile. 

Sometimes on sleepless nights, where her legs hurt with phantom pain, aching in a bone-deep way that she knows isn’t actually there. Sometimes on nights like those, Ness will study El’s sleeping face for hours looking for similarities: in their cheekbones, the shape of their faces, and their upturned noses, their ears and how their eyes crinkle in the same way when they yawn. 

It’s less in the way that they look than the way that they are. How they laugh the same: a sharp huff of breath followed by loud cawing laughter, as if they’ve surprised themselves. How they smile quietly, more with their eyes than their mouths. How they clasp their hands together when they talk, as if they’re too afraid of their own gestures to move too far from themselves. How they draw out the vowels of their words, making the O’s sound more like hums, and slightly lisp their esses: uuhv coursse maa’am. How when they think, they rub their knuckles and wrists, as if searching for jewelry that they don’t have on, have never worn. 

But no. People compare Ness to her mother. 

But after hearing all those stories about her mother, and the decisions she made, making the choices that she did regardless of future impact. How little she cared for others. Ness really prefers El.


	3. CHAPTER 3

Another secret that Ness has never shared with anyone: she hates her mother. Everyone is always telling her about how lovely and distant and doomed and brave her mother was (for daring to love her ugly and outcasted green firstborn child and still try for another despite all warnings against it- and for having the courage to try to change the situation and give her life in exchange for her weak and helpless and disfigured second daughter when the Dark Gods came to the cottage to collect her after birth- because her mother is the only reason she survived. Of course. Her mother is the reason she is the way that she is). Who died bringing Ness into the world; so that Ness could live (and be mocked and shunned and praised and favoured and-). And how tragic it was, wasn’t it? Such a fine life, cut so short so soon~. 

And here is where Nessa’s bland smiles grow teeth and she politely excuses herself and genially wheels away before she can use those teeth to bite someone’s hand off. 

Because after spending all these years growing up with her dead sister acting guardian and teacher, she’s obviously spent some of that time asking questions about the dead and dying and living and those who are some of all of that in between. So she knows what keeps a spirit bound to a place or a realm or a person, alright? And what really gets her is that no one even THINKS to even mention El, and about how she spent the first (and last) years of her life as well as her afterlife watching over Ness when no one else would. (well, that’s not quite right. People watched her for many reasons: her father was the mayor, she was crippled and “helpless”, her mother was dead and her sister was a monster and then she was a “monster, but at least one dead and gone” etc) but no one ever really seemed to see her. Except El. (and maybe that was why Ness was the only one who ever seemed to see El).


	4. CHAPTER 4

The older she gets, the more the dead notice her. Or the more she notices them, it seems. They ignore her for the most part: mostly they keep to haunting her from a distance and watching her with their sad, sad, white eyes. 

Some people theorize that the dead can’t feel; no body, no emotions. Only memory.

Ness disagrees. Emotion is all that they have left, after all the people and places that they guard are all gone. To live so deeply entrenched in a memory or a feeling at an exact moment of death that you are forced to relive it again and again, even after you should have faded away? That’s some pretty strong feelings right there, Ness thinks. Even if it is, after all, only an echo.

Maybe that’s why ghosts are so angry- they can only really process one emotion at a time, and oftentimes the strongest emotions they feel is the last one they’re left with: usually anger. The stronger spirits are the ones with the strongest emotions. 

That’s a lot of angry ghosts.


	5. Chapter 5

The cool days, the cold crisp clear ones, when the temperature’s low enough that your breath mists out in front of you and your lungs hurt from effort? Those are the worst days. 

Not the bright, muggy, warm summer days where the air is so thick you could swim in it- the day like the kind of day when El died (it helps that she never really left). But those sharp days are the worst, when she can actually feel the phantom ache of pain deep in the lanes of her useless legs and rubbed raw palms. 

It’s probably because on those days, the cold that always radiates off El is less noticeable- more in tune with the cold weather outside. Weather that they could never enjoy as children due to their various ailments and personal reasons. It’s because when it’s cold, it’s so easy to forget that El’s not fully there- when they’re having the fun they didn’t as kids- it’s different to see El laughing for once, acting the child that she never got to be, acting the age that she is perpetually now and for eternity stuck with- strong and whole- and most of all, unaffected by the snow. It’s lovely and sad, but disturbing too, seeing her perpetually young and bony face and body- still soft with never lost baby fat- standing in the snow, not making indentations or even a shadow where her bare feet rest on it below her.


	6. Chapter 6

Ness has panic attacks during really bad rainstorms. She doesn’t mind the thunder, it’s always been a comfort, fun to count down with El as they bundle under the covers deep. Snickering at the stories they’d make up to explain the crashes and rumbles: giants battling, a dragon stumbling tipsy like Mr.Farland from down the road after he’s had too much to drink and his wife chases him down with a broomstick, an ogre with a bellyache, a bakemono with a head cold, ozma’s teakettle going off in the rain. Ness panics, because what if she loses El again? What if whatever El felt the first time isn’t enough to bring her back a second time? Can a ghost die a second time? (Ness is scared to find out, she thinks she might just die herself if she were to lose her big sister permanently). Logically, she knows that it’s impossible now, with El in her in-between state and no longer affected by the realm of the living) though the same cannot be claimed for the other way around. But rainy days are the ones on which El flickers in and out of focus smudging like worn out eyes losing focus on an already known object, twisted expression, worn out from the effort of manifestation or half remembered pains.


	7. Chapter 7

El still comes in to read her bedtime stories. She talks about princesses and witches being friends, with the dragons and fighting and their papa doesn't think it's strange at all that she's stopped asking him and Nurse for bedtime stories. He just thinks it's grief and quiet resentment. 

Resentment for what, he doesn’t know, nor can he feel- since he felt no connection to the cursed child. 

Here’s the thing: while Ness and El’s mother was brave for having dared to love her disfigured children and her monster child, their father was considered brave for daring to even have the monster child under his roof. 

And Ness? Ness was considered young and foolish for daring to have an attachment to that /thing/. 

Ness doesn’t realize it’s strange, being told ghost stories by a ghost; bedtime rhymes by a benefactor; fairytales by a phantom. She knows it’s normal of course: everyone at her school and in their village her age has bedtime stories told by /someone/, so why shouldn’t it be her older sister? 

She doesn’t mean to not mention that she can see El to anyone, it’s just? El has always been shy and nobody reacts well to the knowledge of Ness’s “cursed” older sibling, so she’s long grown used to never mentioning El directly or by name- she just becomes vague assumptions of “someone I know” and “a family member” or “a friend” (because she is all of those things; most people assume an imaginary friend, she is young after all, experiencing such tragedy. They assume wrong).


	8. Chapter 8

The first time it hits her that her sister is actually dead like actually really dead is when she sees El laughing in a rainstorm, awestruck at how it can't hurt her anymore. 

She shrieks, and Ness panics. She remembers the stories El told her, about wet cloths scrubbed harshly over her skin, perfunct and short to be touching her with no sympathy, but painful rashes and red welts left behind. The fear during thunderstorms is still real, El flickering in and out of reality, forgetting to piece herself together into something even close to approaching human. Ness /knows/ this reality, as personal as El does. Her sister’s fear is her own. 

So when she hears the shrieks, cracking through the gentle patter of the rain like a crack, she panics- right up until it is followed by a loud pang of laughter. And her frantic searching ends on the shade of her sister- standing still and loud in the wet, raindrops falling through her harshly upturned face, neck tilted back at an angle no living person could manage. Not without a broken neck at least. 

And Ness realises. She doesn’t expect the relief that slams through her, quickly followed by wonder, and something unnameable that she will only later recognize as sadness (an empty thing to feel indeed).

**Author's Note:**

> this is mainly a collection of short worded snapchats that I've written over the years, that I'll probably add to over time, and will most likely grow plot and consume me as most of my wips have done, whether they're posted or not and let me tell you, ask if you want to, because I have MANY MANY wips from various fandoms like find me over at the hell site as maplewoodmoth.tumblr.com too, and ask me about them sometime. It's a side blog so don't be scared by it's emptiness so far.


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